Smithsonian Magazine IBWO article

There's a Smithsonian magazine article on the ivory-bill here. Below are some snippets in black, along with my comments in red.
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Everyone realized that if word leaked out, birders would stampede to the forest, hoping to add the woodpecker to their life lists, and greatly complicate the mission.
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Actually, the word is now fully "out", and no such stampede has occurred.
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The clincher was a video made in April 2004 by David Luneau, a professor of electronics at the University of Arkansas and a member of the Big Woods search team. Luneau took me, moving silently in a canoe rigged with an electric trolling motor, to the spot where he and his brother-in-law got just three or four seconds of video as the ivory-bill flew away. Still, it was enough to clearly show the enormous patches of white on the rear half of the wings and bands of white on the back—proof that this was no mere pileated woodpecker.
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In my opinion, this video provides no such proof, clearly or unclearly.
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Even after I had spent days in the forest, canoeing with team members or sitting quietly alone on an observation platform, listening to the whooping of barred owls, I sometimes found it hard to believe the object of the hunt was real.
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Agreed.
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Ivory-billed woodpeckers can live up to 30 years...
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Can they? Cornell's own Birds of North America says there is "no data" on the IBWO's life span. The late Eirik Blom wrote that the Pileated life span record was about 12 years.
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The trees are still relatively young compared with the 1,000-year-old monsters that once grew there. But in this part of the world trees grow fast, and some of the second-growth is now a century old.
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Fast-growing trees were poor Ivory-bill habitat. Decrepit, dying old trees were far better.
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People claim to have seen the bird in half a dozen or more places around the South—the Apalachicola River, Wekiva River and the Fakahatchee/Big Cypress Swamp in Florida, the Congaree Swamp in South Carolina, the Pascagoula and Yazoo rivers in Mississippi, and the Pearl River in Louisiana.
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Unverifiable Ivory-bill sightings should not be the source of undue optimism. According to this article, The Texas Bigfoot Research Center investigates about 100 Bigfoot sightings in the state each year.
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